Reply to comment

Elana I always seem to find myself commenting on your posts...

This is such a critical comment, I think. Reading the news really "blows my mind" these days because of how easy it seems for some people to willfully resist what seems to me to be totally, unassailably true and rational. There's a lot of philosophy of a lot of different kinds that deals with these kinds of problems, many of which I've encountered simply by being a philosophy major and having to take certain classes: the ways that "discourses" can not only shape but determine our thought; the ways that truth claims can be justified, argued and defended; even arguments that go all the way to the scale of the brain and try to account for knowledge exists in our minds. There's also been a fair amount of media coverage about the ways that new media technologies can function not to widen our worlds, but to make them smaller (I think we may have even talked about Cass Sunstein's book about the internet in this class, where he argues that the internet works to actually reinforce our preselected biases, because we tend to engage with perspectives to which we are already drawn).

It would be really cool to spend even just a little bit of class time tonight or next week talking about the physical systems that make possible this kind of selection (which seems at least superficially related to what we are going to be talking about in our presentation). I also think it's cool, as a philosophy major, to see this really promising intersection between what I'm studying and what people in the natural sciences are studying; it doesn't really seem possible to understand these issues without taking pieces from several disciplines (which is, I guess, what this class is about).